I didn't find this theme in the archive — I came to the archive from it. Tea is the material I work in: I build brands for tea houses and tea makers, I photograph dry leaf, I brew gongfu style at a table not unlike the one in this frame. So when I went looking through The Met's Asian Art collection, I wasn't browsing. I was looking for objects I already knew how to hold.
I went looking for a teapot and stayed for the repair.
The Takatori tea jar, 18th century, has gold kintsugi veins across its body — it broke once, centuries ago, and someone decided it was worth mending with gold rather than discarding. Next to it I placed a Yixing stoneware teapot by Shi Dabin, shaped like a plum blossom, early 17th century — Yixing is where the teapot as a form was born. Both are palm-sized. The jar is 8.3 cm tall, smaller than a fist.
That scale nearly killed the piece. Every generation wanted to make them monumental — the teapot came out the size of a watermelon a dozen times before "smaller than the cups beside them" finally held. The failed versions are on the canvas, next to the one where the model gave the teapot an overhead kettle handle and I had to inpaint the correct side loop from the museum photograph. When you've poured from these shapes for years, you notice a wrong handle immediately.
The room is 2125. The koi overhead are holograms — a living pond is a luxury that future may not keep. The neon megacity glows through the moon gate. But the cup is still steaming and the leaves are still scattered, because someone just stepped away mid-ceremony. These objects are not artifacts there. They are still teapots.
The jar already survived one breaking. In my frame it is four hundred years further on — still held, still poured from. In 2125, the hologram is the copy of nature. The mended clay is what remains real.
Everything is on the canvas: the Met photographs, the oversized failures, the wrong handles, the frame that worked.
Original work: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/63081
Tea jar, Takatori ware, 18th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 25.60.24a, b. Open Access.
Original work: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/42323
Teapot in the Shape of a Plum Blossom. Shi Dabin, early 17th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982.362a, b. Open Access.
Canvas: https://app.flora.ai/join-project/d9051b43-f26b-407b-b5db-66aba324daa2
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